Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Ugliness without tact is horrible.

A singular fact, that, when man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes.

Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works.

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

Language,-human language,-after all is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls, and other utterances of brute nature,-sometimes not so adequate.

Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison.